This is a blog by a former CEO of a large Boston hospital to share thoughts about negotiation theory and practice, leadership training and mentoring, and teaching.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

On learning organizations

Please check out this new article I wrote for the Athenahealth Leadership Forum. The lede:

A colleague once said, “Every plan is excellent, until it’s tested. It’s execution that’s the problem.” And so it is.

Excerpts:

Project advocates enter every endeavor with a theory of the case, a
vision of how things should be. But, as my late colleague Donald Schön
noted, reflective practitioners are constantly reviewing the evidence to
modify their framework in response to reality.

Lean organizations understand that there is no group of central
planners clever enough to design an optimum complex process. Lean
leaders do not lack for a strong purpose—indeed audacious goals are
favored—but neither do they lack humility.

Lean and other similarly designed organizations can only exist where
the senior leadership is a strong advocate for the proposition that
reflective practice is the best way to achieve outstanding performance
for their customers. The leaders of such organizations embed that
modesty and reflection in every aspect of their lives.

It is interesting to see the confluence between collaboration and lean in such a power based system like health care. Tomorrow I am going to visit Seattle Children's Hospital hospital - one of the leaders in Lean and not surprisingly one of our first adopters to ry out a a new health care based - cross organization enterprise level social networking platform.